Umbro – Retail design with flexible POS

Umbro have released a new retail concept which has been applied to the brand’s HQ showroom in Manchester. The initial brief was to introduce a more practical and flexible product merchandising display. The reason for the project was in part, to reduce production and implementation costs, with the hope of rolling this out across the globe. This seems to be a design trend in Retail in the last few years with the popularity of low budget pop-up shops and no frills showrooms sweeping across our cities. I recently visited the Nike shop at Boxpark in London and was impressed with how they use the space to their advantage, using large graphic displays instead of confusing POS.

The company that Umbro trusted with this responsibility is Mynt, a Retail Design Agency based in Leicestershire. They have a depth of retail experience when it comes to global sports brands, from Gola to Wrangler and my personal favourite adidas – they worked on concepts for the Mi customiser.

How did they do it?

For this project they used new free-standing fixtures, flexible merchandising systems with inter-changeable digital price cards and perimeter wall displays to help with navigation. All of the propping helps bring one of England’s most cherished football brands to life in the retail environment.

As you can see from the images above, they still follow some of the basic rules when designing for retail:

– The navigation and categories are defined with large photography giving the shopper a clear understanding of what section they are in.

– They encourage interaction with the products, including a mini turfed area for you to try on some football boots – an engaging piece of retail.

Overall, the new store has a great feel and it has certainly given me some things to think about for the next Retail Design project we receive. Thinking of how we can bring a flexibility to not only the store layout, but the messaging within that seems to be the main thing I’ve taken from this.